10.28.2010

In light of the recent incident at a Rand Paul appearance in Kentucky, in which a couple of his goons assaulted and stomped on the head of a woman counterdemonstrator from MoveOn, we thought it was time to update the design of the historic Gadsden Flag -- a.k.a. "Don't Tread On Me" flag.

10.26.2010

CARACAS: Koch Industries said it had received no word that Venezuela nationalised Fertinitro, a large fertilizer maker in which the US-based group has a substantial stake.

Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez announced that the takeover of Fertinitro, one of the world’s main producers of nitrogen fertilizer, days after vowing to radicalize his socialist “revolution” following legislative elections last month.

Koch has a 35 per cent stake in Fertinitro and Venezuelan state-run petrochemicals company Pequiven has 35 per cent. Saipem, a unit of Italy’s Eni, holds 20 per cent and local brewer and food company Polar has the rest.

“Koch Fertilizer has not received any official or informal notice, nor have we received any notification from Fertinitro regarding any disruption,” a Koch spokeswoman told Reuters by email. “We are attempting to obtain details and information.”

Chavez has put much of the OPEC member’s economy into government hands during his 12 years in power. He has said he will accelerate the pace of reforms after the opposition won 40 per cent of National Assembly seats and almost half the popular vote in Sept.26 parliamentary elections.

Also on Sunday, Chavez announced the nationalization of a local motor lubricants company and said the state would take control of nearly 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) of land owned by British meat company Vestey Foods.

Last week, the government nationalised a major local agricultural supplies company, Agroislena.

Venezuela’s Oil Minister Rafael Ramirez said the nationalization of Fertinitro guaranteed the government access to all the fertilizer it needed for farmers and a nationwide seeding plan that would ensure abundant, cheap food for all. ...>more

BP and several other big European companies are funding the midterm election campaigns of Tea Party favourites who deny the existence of global warming or oppose Barack Obama's energy agenda, the Guardian has learned.

An analysis of campaign finance by Climate Action Network Europe (Cane) found nearly 80% of campaign donations from a number of major European firms were directed towards senators who blocked action on climate change. These included incumbents who have been embraced by the Tea Party such as Jim DeMint, a Republican from South Carolina, and the notorious climate change denier James Inhofe, a Republican from Oklahoma.

The report, released tomorrow, used information on the Open Secrets.org database to track what it called a co-ordinated attempt by some of Europe's biggest polluters to influence the US midterms. It said: "The European companies are funding almost exclusively Senate candidates who have been outspoken in their opposition to comprehensive climate policy in the US and candidates who actively deny the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is caused by people." ...>more

Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

10.22.2010

The Wall Street Journal reports:A mysterious cyber attack apparently struck the computer servers at the pro-tea party group FreedomWorks this morning, just as it launched a major fund-raising drive.

FreedomWorks officials are investigating, but they suspect they were attacked deliberately, perhaps by a political opponent seeking the thwart its fund-raising efforts.

The attack crippled the site at about 9:45 a.m. just when the fund-raising drive was publicized on the radio by conservative talk show host Glenn Beck. The group estimates it lost about $80,000 in potential donations as it struggled to bring its site back online...>more

In a bizarre press conference Monday, Alaska GOP Senate candidate Joe Miller announced he will no longer answer questions about his past and blamed the media for focusing on personal attacks instead of the issues.

"We’ve drawn a line in the sand. You can ask me about background, you can ask about personal issues — I’m not going to answer. I’m not," he said, continuing:

This is about the issues. This is not about continuing the personal attacks, it’s not about continuing the diversions based in illegal acts. This is about moving the state forward. And that’s our commitment.

There has been a steady stream of revelations in recent weeks about Miller, who was a little-known attorney until he beat Sen. Lisa Murkowski in an upset in the August primary (she is now running as a write-in candidate). It has emerged in recent weeks that Miller took advantage of various programs that he thinks are unconstitutional or should be gutted, like Medicaid and federal farm subsidies.

The press conference appeared to be a response to a report on the news website Alaska Dispatch about Miller's employment at the Fairbanks North Star Borough, where he worked for seven years as a part-time attorney before leaving last year under unclear circumstances. (A borough is the Alaskan equivalent of a county.)

Citing an anonymous former borough employee, Alaska Dispatch reported that Miller was caught in 2008 using borough computers to do personal politicking. Miller has conspicuously not denied the report, but he blasted Alaska Dispatch at his press conference Monday. "Their so-called journalistic objective is anything negative about Joe," he said. He also claimed, without citing evidence, that someone in the media had illegally gained access to his personnel file. ...>more

10.10.2010

The best way to deal with jerks online is to ignore them. But when prominent Tea Partiers on Twitter started being harassed by a group of Internet trolls, they launched a twitter militia and concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory.

Twittergate is the hottest new conspiracy theory out of the conservative blogosphere. Yesterday, Glenn Beck's news site, The Blaze, posted an epic YouTube video which purports to expose a massive conspiracy by Democrats to take over Twitter: "DID DEMOCRATS HIRE A ‘TWITTER-THUG' TO SMEAR THE TEA PARTY?" The Blaze asks. ...more

10.06.2010

If tea party candidates were serious about stopping runaway spending and bringing fiscal responsibility to Washington, they would have to address one of the most egregious wastes of taxpayer dollars: federal farm subsidies. These handouts have become little more than taxpayer robbery, sending billions of dollars every year to wealthy “farmers,” even some who do not farm at all. It is not an opportunity the tea party is willing to take.

“Washington paid out a quarter of a trillion dollars in federal farm subsidies between 1995 and 2009, but to characterize the programs as either a ‘big government’ bailout or another form of welfare would be manifestly unfair—to bailouts and welfare,” says Ken Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group, a watchdog that tracks federal farm subsidies. “After all, with bailouts taxpayers usually get their money back (often with interest), while welfare recipients are subjected to harsh means-testing, time-limited benefits, and a work requirement. …”

Not so with farm subsidies. Forget about helping struggling farmers—this taxpayer-funded gravy train is skewed primarily toward the rich, paying out billions to “McRanches” and to businesses like Fidelity National Financial, a Fortune 500 company, which got $6.5 million over four years to not farm its land.

If you think such blatant waste would galvanize the tea party, think again.

Truth is, the primary goal of tea party politicians is not to shrink the government, but to use it to transfer taxpayer wealth to rich Republicans. And there is no bigger welfare-for-the-rich program than federal farm subsidies, which have been paying out $20 billion a year to some of the richest—and predominantly Republican-affiliated—people in the country.

With so much money sloshing around, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that tea party politicians have gotten their share.

Take Rep. Michele Bachmann, the self-appointed leader of the tea party movement and recent founder of the Tea Party Caucus, whose stated mission is to promote “fiscal responsibility, adherence to the Constitution and limited government” in the House of Representatives.

But, as I first reported on Truthdig in December 2009, Bachmann’s free-market beliefs do not seem to apply to her own pocketbook. According to federal records compiled by the Environmental Working Group, since 1995 the congresswoman profited from $251,973 in dairy and corn subsidies via a stake in her family’s farm. Bachmann’s financial disclosure forms indicate that her piece of the business earned her a (federally subsidized) income of up to $50,000 in 2008, a nice addition to the $174,000 taxpayer-funded salary she gets as a House member.

Bachmann is not the only tea party subsidy queen. Many of the fresh-faced tea party candidates jockeying for a spot in Congress on a platform of “fiscal responsibility” and “small government” are quite content to allow themselves—and their constituents—to keep feeding at the “big government” trough. ...>more

Let me demonstrate how the Kochs’ investment into libertarianism has paid off by way of a near-stroke experience I just had a couple of days ago. There I was, just wasting time on Reddit, when I came across one of those beyond-idiotic-and-evil headlines that bite you if you’re not careful: “Is rising inequality in America exaggerated?” The headline linked to an article in The Economist.

H’m, is inequality exaggerated? Gosh, let me get my ol’ chin-scratching machine out for this one…

Naturally, I did the exact wrong thing and clicked the headline, which brought me to an Economistarticle titled, “The Inequality Myth: Is Rising Inequality in America Exaggerated?” It was an oddly meat-headed headline for The Economist–usually that magazine’s formula is to zap the reader with somewhat more nuanced right-wing shock value, counteracted with elitist irony and know-it-all charm. Not this time:

SLATE’S Timothy Noah has just wrapped up a ten-part series on the rise of economic inequality in America. Most of Mr Noah’s instalments are devoted to examining the impact of one of the usual suspects—immigration, trade, de-unionisation, education, executive pay, etc—on the level of inequality in the United States. I found Mr Noah’s series disappointing from the start because he failed squarely to confront recent findings that challenge the premise of his exercise.

Many popular narratives about inequality are grounded on the alleged fact that wages and incomes at the middle and bottom of the distribution have been stagnant for decades. It appears that this, too, may be an artefact of insufficiently sophisticated methods for building the price indices used to calculate rates of inflation.

The author of this Economist blog post, identified as “W.W.”, sounded nothing like one of those sly Economist correspondents I’ve known in the past, and everything like a typical ham-fisted right-wing libertarian, the sort that are a dime a dozen in this country. So I wondered: Are the Kochs debasing even their own natural propaganda ally, The Economist, by dumbing it down with one of their own Koch-sponsored libertard meatheads? Who was this “W.W.”? ...>more

Much like his hatchling-nest mate Ryan J. Murdough, Bertram is attempting to slither his way into mainstream politics by appealing to the bloc of voters with whom he thinks he resonates– and he chose the Tea Baggers.

Memo: your pleas to not be viewed as racists are neutered when you not only refuse to ostracise but instead embrace and support blatant white nationalists like Harry Bertram and Ryan J. Murdough.

Here is the Jamie Kelso from the neo-Nazi forum Stormfront and White News Now announcing Bertram’s candidacy.

Please pay close attention to what’s going on in this thread: Bertram is not only running under the A3P banner, he is also the campaign manager for Ryan J. Murdough. This is a clear, documented link between not just two white nationalists, but the entire white nationalist forum, of which Bertram is a senior moderator of White News Now.

These are not specious allegations to “slander” the teabaggers, this is a clear case of teabaggers embracing white nationalists. ...>more